Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. said it had been subject to a cyber attack that resulted in “the disclosure

Google has warned billions of WhatsApp users that backup storage for old chats, photos and videos will soon no longer be free. Messages and media on the hugely popular messaging app will now count towards a user’s Google Account cloud storage limit if they use an Android device. Personal Google Accounts come with 15GB of free storage, however that is shared across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. This means any additional photos, videos and audio files from WhatsApp may force many users to pay for additional storage space. “As an important heads up, WhatsApp backups on Android will soon start counting toward your Google Account cloud storage limit, similar to how WhatsApp backups are handled on other mobile platforms,” a Google community manager wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “WhatsApp backups on Android will continue to work, as long as you have available space within your Google Account storage. If you hit your storage limit, you’ll need to free up space to resume backups by removing items you do not need.” The change will begin rolling out to WhatsApp Beta users next month, before coming to all WhatsApp users on Android in early 2024. Of the roughly 3 billion WhatsApp users around the world, an estimated 73 per cent of them access the app on Android. There are several price options for additional Google storage, with the cheapest monthly plan for 100GB of data starting at $1.99. This would cover all but the most data intensive WhatsApp users. The update comes amid a major overhaul of how Google manages online accounts and data, with all personal accounts that have been inactive for more than two years set to be deleted in December. The move is intended to improve security for active users, though some have noted that it may inadvertently impact people who have set up accounts for young children in order to share memories and milestones, as well as users who are in control of the accounts of deceased relatives. Read More Gmail: Google issues three-week warning to account holders

Why was IShowSpeed's brother bullied at his school? Here's what we know

Mars is often called the Red Planet, but a recent image captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover from the surface would go some way to contradicting that. Earlier this year, Perseverance snapped a sunset from Mars in which the Sun looks blue, a sight which would never be seen from our own planet. The photograph was taken on the rover’s 842nd day on the planet, and shows a Martian horizon with the sun setting behind causing an eerily cool glow. Because of Mars’ distance from the Sun, it gets less sunlight than we do on Earth. Even at its sunniest, it gets less than half our quota of light from the star. And the planet’s atmosphere, which is weaker than Earth’s, is mainly made up of carbon dioxide, with a small amount of nitrogen and a trace of oxygen. This gaseous mix and weak atmosphere causes the light to scatter in a blue haze across the sky. It’s the same process which gives us our blue sky during the daytime, when the light has less atmosphere to penetrate before it reaches our eyes. On Earth, this changes when the sun dips below the horizon, and the light has more atmosphere to penetrate, filtering our blue and violet wavelengths, leaving only reds and oranges. Meanwhile on Mars, the sunlight interacts with the dust hanging in the atmosphere, scattering red light during the day. At twilight, that red light is filtered away, leaving blues. Atmospheric scientist Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University told Science Alert: "The colours come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently. “When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the Sun than light of other colours does. “The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the Sun.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

European officials are investigating whether Microsoft's practice of bundling its Teams software with Office 365 is anticompetitive, the European Commission said Thursday.

It’s well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever. By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree. This allowed them to see how a person’s genetic sequence relates to another using the points of the genome. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said. “We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.” Where they lived? Sudan, Africa. Dr Wohns told Reuters, "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans," Dr Wohns said. Researchers used 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations and samples that ranged from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. By using a new method to compile the data, algorithms were able to predict where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation. The results were a network of almost 27 million ancestors. “The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples,” Dr Wohns says. Not only does the data help us understand human geology better but the new method could help in other research, like medicine. “The underlying method could have widespread applications in medical research, for instance identifying genetic predictors of disease risk," Dr Wohns added. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has updated its company’s core values, replacing words like “thoughtful” and “collaborative” with “intense and scrappy”. The AI firm’s values, published on a careers page of its website, were changed between 25 September and 16 October, according to a screenshot captured by the Internet Archive. The top value is listed as “AGI focus”, referring to artificial general intelligence that is considered to be at the same level or greater than human-level intelligence. “We are committed to building safe, beneficial AGI that will have a massive positive impact on humanity’s future. Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope,” the new values state. The Independent has reached out to OpenAI for comment on whether the move signals a shift in company direction. The update, first spotted by Business Insider, comes amid an industry-wide push towards the development of AGI, with some academics and experts accelerating their timelines for it being achieved since the launch of ChatGPT last year. Forecasts suggest that the arrival of AGI could be hugely destabilising for the global economy, with some even warning that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, based at Oxford University, previously warned that the arrival of AGI would precede so-called superintelligence, whereby computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence and AI development becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. In one thought experiment involving a rogue AI, Mr Bostrom wrote: “The AI will realise quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off.” OpenAI has consistently called for a careful approach to the development of such technology, arguing that it could have profound implications for society, like curing diseases and turbocharging the economy. Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit that his company had achieved AGI “internally”, however he later claimed that it was just a joke. “Obviously this is just memeing, y’all have no chill, when AGI is achieved it will not be announced with a Reddit comment,” he wrote. Read More The mystery AI device that could replace your phone The mystery AI device that could replace your phone Elon Musk’s X may charge some users $1 a year to post on platform Apple just released a new Pencil after days of excitement

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, brought back many previously banned far-right users, and removed moderation

A number of different puzzles have been circulating on social media - for example the egg, glove, envelope and crutch picture. Now the latest one to capture people's attention is all to do with an odd image of what appears to be Disney princess Pocahontas sitting on the toilet in a bathroom. “I’m sure you can’t find the 4th object,” the puzzle instruct and has a list of four different items to look out for in the image: A whistle, egg, brush and flower. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Sounds pretty straight forward right? @larry2k23 #CapCut #cocofun Well it is (at least for the first three objects) as the whistle is the toilet handle, the egg is on Pocahontas's necklace and brush is part of the princess's underwear. After this, you may have spent some time feeling impatient since finding the flower appears to be a trickier task. Though it turns out there isn’t actually a flower in the image at all. Following a similar pattern to other fourth object challenges, this is a silly social media prank to entice people in a bid to improve or boost their engagement on their social media profiles. Often this involves someone going live on TikTok and displaying the puzzle and then proceeding to change their profile picture to read “Tap the + to see it”. This is to try and encourage you to click to find the answer, but instead of providing answers, you are actually taken to their profile. Elsewhere, people cannot find the french fries in this image. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Liz Lee and Ella Cao BEIJING (Reuters) -China on Wednesday dispatched thousands of rescue workers to Zhuozhou, a flooded

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Tesla wants the Biden administration to finalize more stringent vehicle emissions limits than those proposed

Robots could soon take over doctors’ jobs, according to experts. A recent study found that AI technology was able to accurately diagnose patients in a healthcare setting. Investigators found the controversial model ChatGPT to be nearly 72 per cent accurate in making clinical decisions. It was also 77 per cent accurate in making final diagnoses. It was able to come up with possible diagnoses, final diagnoses and care management decisions. The artificial intelligence chatbot was found to perform equally well in both primary care and emergency settings. Researchers at Mass General Brigham in Boston, Massachusetts conducted the study. They tested how ChatGPT would be able to work through an entire clinical encounter with a patient. This included recommending a diagnostic workup, deciding the clinical management course, and ultimately making the final diagnosis. It was tested by putting 36 published clinical descriptions into ChatGPT. Patient gender, age and symptoms were put into the language model. ChatGPT was then given further information and asked to make management decisions and a final diagnosis. This simulates the process of seeing a real patient. However, scientists also found it was less accurate - 60 per cent - at making several possible diagnoses. Co-author Marc Succi said: “Our paper comprehensively assesses decision support via ChatGPT from the very beginning of working with a patient through the entire care scenario, from differential diagnosis all the way through testing, diagnosis, and management. ”No real benchmarks exist, but we estimate this performance to be at the level of someone who has just graduated from medical school, such as an intern or resident. ”This tells us that LLMs in general have the potential to be an augmenting tool for the practice of medicine and support clinical decision making with impressive accuracy.” The research team say they will soon be looking at whether AI tools can improve patient care and outcomes in resource-constrained areas of hospitals. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.